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Doris Day: gifted performer, heroic emblem of American womanhood

Mick LaSalleMay 13, 2019Updated: May 13, 2019, 5:40 pm

Doris Day in 1989. Photo: Uncredited, Associated Press

Doris Day, an accomplished and versatile band singer who went on to become the most popular female box office star in the entire history of feature films, died Monday at her home in Carmel Valley. She was 97 years old.

“Day had been in excellent physical health for her age, until recently contracting a serious case of pneumonia, resulting in her death,” the Doris Day Animal Foundation said in an emailed statement.

Doris Day’s official website, www.dorisday.com, reported the death, and added that “she was surrounded by a few close friends as she passed.” The site also says, “Doris’ wishes were that she have no funeral or memorial service and no grave marker.”

With her creamy, husky voice and wholesome blond looks, Day was an emanation of the 1950s, walking with seeming effortlessness the tightrope between what was attractive and what was acceptable for a woman in postwar America. But her singing voice had a range and depth her roles never allowed her. In “Sentimental Journey,” Day’s first hit, recorded with Les Brown’s band in late 1944 when she was in her early 20s, her voice already oozes insinuation and life experience. And in her screen roles, one often got the sense that the women she played had miles of story behind the faces they showed the world.

Born in Cincinnati in 1922, Doris Kappelhoff originally trained to become a dancer. Following a serious car accident in 1937, she discovered a talent for singing and soon began getting jobs on local radio. A bandleader, Barney Rapp, suggested that she change her name from Kappelhoff to Day, having admired her rendition of “Day After Day,” a popular song of the period.

Her star steadily rose. Day became an attraction on Bob Hope’s national radio program, had hits with Les Brown and, in 1948, got a small role in the film “Romance on the High Seas.” She was soon bumped up to a leading role when the star, Betty Hutton, became pregnant. Day never looked back. From there, it was a steady rise.

In 1950, she could still appear as a second lead, in “Young Man With a Horn,” but by 1951 she was a headliner.

Doris Day in the 1950s. Photo: Hulton Archive, Getty Images

Day was no ingenue, even when she played one. She had the history of the touring show and the live stage in her demeanor. She was strong and controlled, a savvy performer. She was a spirit of fun without being a moron, enough of a comedian that she could take a pratfall and come back from it. She gave the men in her audience what they wanted to see, and because people rarely ever know what they want until they’re shown, she showed them: She was a playmate, a helpmate, a good woman and, to some degree, an artificial construct.

Men saw her in her a wife. Women saw in her an avenue to power. She showed how to be professional and useful, without seeming threatening; how to be independent, while still seeming virtuous. In a sense, she represented what a woman had to do to be a man’s companion in the middle of the 20th century. But always you knew, if you paid attention — if you bothered to pay attention — that under the cool surface was a much tougher person.

Indeed, whatever she had to do, Day did immaculately. She was so gifted and so prepared that she could walk into a studio and record a soundtrack album in a series of first takes. She hit her marks, and, in the early 1960s, she was an expert in the mirthless, sexless sex comedy, with co-stars such as Rock Hudson and James Garner. She was a perfectionist, and if she lacked anything as a performer, it was only that she could never really be abandoned, not from the depths of her being.

Day was a songbird in the gilded cage of her time. As such, her art didn’t serve her inspiration so much as her escape, enabling her to live a life much more interesting than those of the women she played. For that reason there is something robust and yet a little bit joyless in her screen performances, though she was most certainly a joy giver.

In a sense, Doris Day was the last of the great screen women we must watch as though decoding hidden messages. Like Marilyn Monroe, practically her screen opposite, Day was a lot more interesting than her movies. Her essence and value emerge in the totality of her work, rather than in any specific role. In “Love Me or Leave Me” (1955), as the singer Ruth Etting, we see her in her element, as a nightclub singer. In “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956), we see her dramatic capacity, as a panic-stricken mother in a dead marriage to a hard man. She’s a model of professionalism in “Teacher’s Pet” (1958). And though her sex(less) comedies, such as “Pillow Talk” (1959), are the farthest thing from funny, Day’s high-spiritedness is always winning. She tells us as much truth as her movies would let her.

Doris Day and Frank Sinatra. Photo: Zuma Press, TNS

That’s the frustration of Day’s legacy. She left history lots to ponder and much to enjoy, over 30 albums and 39 films, but you get the feeling that she had plenty more to give, but that her era wasn’t interested. The album she recorded with a jazz trio led by Andre Previn hints at her broad range. She was a natural as a jazz singer.

Likewise, an appearance on “The Tonight Show” in 1974 makes one wonder about the movies she might have made in a less constrained era. For once, she dressed in a way that didn’t hide her body, and she was beautiful. She shared the stage with the late comedian Carol Wayne, and, not interested in bantering with her, she froze the younger woman out, with a composure, an assertion and a hauteur she rarely ever showed on screen. What fun it might have been had Day not been forced to make nice all those years.

In the immediate aftermath of Day’s peak popularity, and in the first flush of the women’s movement, there was a tendency to write off Day as an antiquated throwback. But in 1974, the feminist scholar Molly Haskell, in her breakthrough work, “From Reverence to Rape,” made the case for Day as an important and heroic emblem of American womanhood: “A home-grown existential female lifted into the modern world with few fundamental moral guidelines, she creates herself. Out of the assorted impulses of ambition and love she becomes someone and tries, with plenty of odds against her, to find out where she belongs and what she can do.”

And she could do it all. Including leaving the Hollywood scene.

Doris Day transitioned from film to television, then retired to live in Carmel-by-the-Sea. Photo: HO, REUTERS

After transitioning from film to television, retiring from acting in 1973, and working through four marriages — including one, to Martin Melcher, that left her in financial ruins — Day virtually disappeared to live in Carmel-by-the-Sea, where she owned the Cypress Inn. The coastal town became Day’s refuge, a place where she mostly isolated herself from the world to focus on working with animals through her Doris Day Animal Foundation, which had a simple but effective mission: to help animals and the people who love them.

She reportedly once said, “I’ve never met an animal I didn’t like, and I can’t say the same thing about people.”

Day remained mostly invisible from the public eye, in an era where social media and camera phones turned everyone into potential paparazzi. But her birthday became a special time for her fans, when Day would make an annual call to Magic 63 KIDD, a radio station in Monterey, to remind fans she was still there, and to share the irrepressible essence that made her such a beloved star.